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mental health
Despite Growing Alarm, Trump Says Record USS Lincoln Deployment ‘Not Nearly Long Enough’
“Countdown until this is used in an attack ad.”
Aug 14, 2026
President Donald Trump said on Friday that he wasn't concerned about reports of wretched conditions and possible suicide attempts by sailors aboard the USS Lincoln. He said their record-breaking deployment as part of his Iran War is "not nearly long enough."
Earlier this week, military publications detailed deteriorating mental health aboard the ship, where about 5,000 sailors and Marines have been deployed for more than 260 days and have gone roughly 200 days without returning to port.
Following earlier reports of food shortages, faulty plumbing, and grueling 12-16 hour workdays, the Military Times reported that multiple sailors have attempted to jump overboard.
The Navy has declined to say whether the incidents were suicide attempts and has said it has “not observed an increase in suicidal ideations or attempts aboard the ship."
Last week, more than 200 spouses and other family members met with senior Navy leaders in San Diego to raise concerns about conditions aboard the carrier, including sailors' mental health and risks of suicide and self-harm, according to Stars and Stripes.
The Navy did not fully detail how it was responding to family members’ concerns, though it said the ship had counselors, chaplains, medical professionals, and other support services. Family members also said officials told them additional mental health personnel were being sent.
As Democrats pressed the Pentagon for answers and oversight into conditions on the Lincoln, Trump was asked about the complaints as he prepared to board Air Force One on Friday.
"The family members of US service members are concerned about the conditions on the USS Lincoln," a reporter said.
"No, they're not," Trump interjected.
He noted that the ship was in the process of leaving its current Middle East deployment to be replaced with "a very similar ship," referring to the USS George Washington.
"Has the deployment gone on too long?" the reporter asked.
"No, no, no," Trump responded. "Not nearly long enough."
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee immediately seized on the remark, portraying it as another instance of Trump displaying callous disregard for soldiers "abandoned in a pointless war."
Trump has previously faced criticism for downplaying the harms Americans face as a result of his war in Iran. For those at home, he's emphasized that he was not worried "even a little bit" about the war's economic costs and has said it's "not possible" to take care of funding for daycare, Medicare, and Medicaid because "we’re fighting wars."
He's also been accused of disrespecting those who suffered and died in combat by using a photo of himself attending a fallen soldier’s dignified transfer in a political fundraising email and by claiming that four slain soldiers had endorsed his rationale to attack Iran and that their loved ones had begged him to "finish the job."
The administration has also been accused of underreporting the casualty numbers from the war, leading to calls for investigation from Democrats.
With midterm elections now less than three months away, Iran continues to be the least popular major war in modern history, with polls consistently showing that only around a third of Americans support it.
Responding to Trump's remarks about soldiers suffering aboard the Lincoln, Brian Finucane, senior adviser for the International Crisis Group's US program, said, "Countdown until this is used in an attack ad."
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US Military Morale in the Middle East Is in the Overflowing Toilet
Rotten food, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscation of alert notification devices for incoming missiles (cellphones), infrequent mail, jumping off aircraft carriers, overflowing toilets... military families speak out for their loved ones, again and again.
Aug 14, 2026
Rotten food, overflowing toilets into bunking areas, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscated cellphones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles, infrequent mail, social media closed down, were some of the issues that military families identified at the national conference of Veterans For Peace.
Spouses and parents of Air Force, Army, Marine, and Navy members told of plummeting morale, lack of basic supplies, and attacks on US military bases that are not reported in the US media.
The frustration of the military families at the VFP conference echoed the descriptions of life on US military bases in the Middle East under attack by the Iranian response to the brutal US-Israeli five-month attack on Iran made by military families who met with the acting assistant secretary of the Navy and the commander of the US Pacific Fleet in San Diego on August 6, 2026.
Big Problems on Long Deployments for US Naval Vessels, Ships’ Infrastructure, and Sailors' Physical and Mental Health
On August 6, 2026, the Navy's senior leadership held listening sessions with the families of aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln's sailors—one in-person session in San Diego, and a second online session later the same evening. Family members leaked recordings of those sessions that described conditions aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln: showers plagued with stubborn mildew, flagging morale, heavy fatigue, shortages of supplies and food, contaminated water supplies, and lost mail.
US troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. But one category appeared far more often than any other: head trauma.
Since departing from Naval Base San Diego on November 21, 2025, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its crew of 5,000 sailors and Marines has been deployed more than 250 days, with only a stop in Guam in December and a brief visit in Oman in June after 208 days at sea.
A second aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford had similar problems when it sailed from the Caribbean to the Middle East after being off Venezuela in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in January 2026. During that deployment, the ship’s toilets kept failing, with sewage often overflowing and spilling onto the floor. Additionally, a fire broke out in the laundry room, causing enough damage that the Ford went into a port on the Greek island of Crete for repairs.
More than 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation, with one sailor medically evacuated from the carrier, after being injured in the damage control effort. Two others were treated for lacerations.
The smoke damage from the laundry room fire extended to the berthing. More than 100 bunks and personal gear were destroyed in the fire.
Articles in Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times detail at least six attempts by crew members to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln, with interviews conducted with sailors and families of those on board who described the impacts of the lengthy deployment.
USS Abraham Lincoln Sailor's Father Proposes 'Parent Swap' To Replace His Son
One parent was fed up with the conditions his son is living under. On August 13, Jefferson Kelley, the father of a USS Abraham Lincoln sailor wrote to his U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) asking Moreno to make an official inquiry to the US Navy to see if he could do a “parent swap” with his son, Jackson, 20, due to the terrible conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Kelley said he had not been asked by his son to make the swap, but he had read of the conditions on the aircraft carrier that included food rations, safety concerns, water contamination, and poor mental health, which has purportedly led to some sailors attempting to jump overboard during the 250 days at sea and felt that he as a parent should share the burden.
Kelley had not discussed his proposal with his son, before writing to the Senator, which may make his son’s remaining time on the aircraft carrier more difficult than it already is!
Army and Marine Ground Forces Under Missile Attacks
Families of US ground forces on the US military bases scattered all over the Middle East describe overcrowding to no room in shelters against incoming missiles and command's confiscating of cellphones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles.
The US military says that Iran watches social media postings of attacks and to prevent such postings, cellphones may be taken away, but families respond that notification of incoming missile attacks is by cellphone.
According to the news outlet War Horse, the only public source for injuries during the US attack on Iran is the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which provides monthly totals for the War on Iran with limited demographic data.
More than 400 casualties (nonlethal) were recorded in the first month between February 28 and April 8 of the US attack on Iran, with Army personnel accounting for most of the casualties.
More than 270 of the roughly 400 casualties (nonlethal) were Army soldiers, and about one-third of those were reservists. Enlisted soldiers accounted for most Army casualties, including 57 sergeants and 53 specialists. But also wounded were 64 Army officers, including 20 captains, and 13 lieutenant colonels or colonels.
The Navy reported 64 casualties, none of whom were classified as seriously injured. The Air Force recorded 51 casualties, and the Marine Corps recorded 19. Unlike the Army, the other branches did not list the type or cause of injury.
US troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. But one category appeared far more often than any other: head trauma.
Hundreds of Troops Suffering From Head Trauma
A large portion of the wounded suffering from head trauma has led some military health experts to worry that traumatic brain injuries—caused by damage to the brain that can impact thinking, movement, and emotion—could become the signature injury of this war, as in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
18 US troops have been killed and 624 wounded Since February 28
The Pentagon has attempted to reduce the accounting on the number of US military killed or wounded in the war on Iran by separating those killed or wounded before the May 1 ceasefire and after. The total killed and wounded before and after the ceasefire are 18 US troops have been killed and 624 wounded since the US began its war against Iran on February 28.
Senate Armed Services Committee Finally Getting Involved
The US Congress is finally getting involved. On August 12, 2026, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the acting secretary of the Navy to express “serious concern” about the increasing length of deployments and demand answers about living conditions aboard the carrier.
“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns,” aboard the ship, he said in the letter, as well as “disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”
Blumenthal’s letter ends with six questions for Hegseth and the Department of Defense to answer concerning conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln and a call to treatment servicewomen and men properly:
The men and women aboard the Lincoln have answered the call to serve their country. The Department owes them not only adequate supplies, maintenance, and support during this deployment, but a sustainable force-generation model that does not rely on repeatedly extending sailors and ships to meet persistent operational demands.
Our servicemembers deserve nothing less than the full support of their government—and the American people deserve a military strategy that is worthy of the sacrifices we ask them to make.
Update: This article has been edited to include a new section, "USS Abraham Lincoln Sailor's Father Proposes 'Parent Swap' To Replace His Son."
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An ICE Killing in Maine Shows Why Vets Need Vetting—And Not Just in Politics
Under current circumstances, no friends, family members, or employment counselors of young veterans should encourage them to answer the siren call of ICE—no matter how much they need a job.
Aug 12, 2026
The media spent a lot of time this summer examining whether a certain Maine oysterman and Marine veteran seeking federal employment should have been better vetted by those around him.
Even after Graham Platner abandoned his US Senate bid, his friends and foes argue about whether service-related conditions—which earned him a 100% disability rating from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—contributed to past substance abuse, mental health problems, and aggression against intimate partners.
Now, in the same state, the spotlight has shifted to David Brouillette, a troubled Afghan war vet who might also have been better off harvesting oysters. Brouillette spent eight years in the US Army and state National Guard before getting hired for not one, but two federal jobs. Thanks to an ill-advised push to recruit more ex-military personnel for law enforcement roles, without proper background checks, he got to carry a gun again.
Last month, after serving as a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) police officer, a prison guard, and then joining the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Brouillette fatally shot Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, a young Colombian immigrant, during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine.
The Vet-to-Cop Pipeline
Thanks to Congress allocating $30 billion to create 10,000 more positions for that agency between 2025 and 2030—and job cuts at other federal departments, which often employ veterans—more ex-soldiers are getting hired into a paramilitary workforce, with insufficient screening, minimal training, and leaders who valorize brutality. Those who have already been cops go to the head of the line for signing bonuses as high as $50,000.
Brouillette is among the 200,000 veterans disproportionately represented in the nation’s nearly 1 million law enforcement jobs, ranging from local police departments to the fast-growing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
During a 10-year period, nearly one-third of more than 500 cops involved in a shooting incident were veterans.
For their own good and the welfare of all Americans, some of these vets should not trade one uniform for another. That’s because past military service not only produces Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); it can also leave former service members with traumatic brain injuries that trigger aggressive and impulsive behavior.
In the case of Maine mass shooter Robert Card, a longtime Army Reserve grenade range instructor who never served in combat, that condition led to the slaughter of 18 neighbors at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, almost three years ago. Far more common is the rocky personal transition to civilian life typified by twice-divorced Brouillette, whose father and brother also served in the military.
Mental Health Issues
According to Brouillette’s first ex-wife, Ashley, he first became verbally and physically abusive after joining the military in 2007. His subsequent misbehavior, she told The New York Times, included choking her, slamming her to the floor, and pushing her against a wall. In 2012, such “threats and harassment were so persistent,” she fled the state to escape him. “He has mental health issues, he’s short-tempered, he’s reactive, [and] he should be in treatment,” she says.
Seven years later, his next ex-wife sought a restraining order against Brouillette after he “broke her door down, destroyed her belongings, and dumped her clothes over a bridge,” and spat in her face. In her court filing, she expressed fear about his stalking her by “coming to my home or sitting in the parking lot of my work.” So, as CNN found, a judge twice issued temporary orders requiring Brouillette to relinquish any firearms in 2019 and 2021.
To make matters worse, when Brouillette retrained to become a firefighter in 2021, a heavy I-beam fell on his head, inflicting serious damage. In a lawsuit over the accident, he confessed to having “impaired memory, cognitive deficits, headaches, vertigo, and high sensitivity.”
Long before he fired the shots that killed Guerrero, he had already worked among VA patients and staff in Maine, as part of an agency police force with its own troubled history of using excessive force. And then he moved on seamlessly to ICE last December, despite a checkered court record and non-military head injury that should have been disqualifying.
A Bad Career Choice
When we were researching an earlier book on veterans, two retired Army officers, both West Point grads, expressed deep concern about policing, of any kind, as a post-military career among veterans at risk for substance abuse and suicide because of PTSD, chronic pain, or traumatic brain injuries.
Daniel Sjursen, a much-decorated major who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, told us that, “when you leave the service, there’s no de-programming…They just load you up on meds, and then you go straight to the police academy.” Because “military-style of policing is based on the notion that high-crime areas should be treated like occupied countries, a guy can come back to Baltimore, Camden, or Detroit and function the same way we did when occupying Kabul or Baghdad.”
As his fellow officer, a Gulf War combat vet and military historian Andrew Bacevic noted, “To the extent that we’ve got a bunch of damaged young people, then maybe the last thing we want to do is put them in a job where they carry a gun in an environment that’s going to make things worse.”
So don’t hold your breath waiting for justice for Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero. For the last 18 months, federal immigration agents have operated with far less public oversight and accountability than any local police department.
Even during Barack Obama’s administration, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) was not listening to such knowledgeable insiders. Instead, the DOJ provided local police departments around the country with tens of millions of dollars to fund veterans-only positions.
As noted in a 2017 report by the Marshall Project, “When Warriors Put On the Badge,” this combination of special funding and preferential hiring mandated by state or federal law has made it harder to “build police forces that resemble and understand diverse communities.” The new hires benefiting most have been disproportionately white, because 60% of all enlisted men and women are not people of color.
Inappropriate Use of Force
Under the first Trump administration, the DOJ had little interest in tracking the later job performance of recently hired veterans or how their military background might affect their behavior.
By that time, however, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) had already raised concerns about “the integration of military personnel” into law enforcement. In their own 2009 hiring guide, the IACP noted that, in the case of returning combat veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan, their combat environment and their policing environments may appear surprisingly similar.”
As a result, prior military service in the Middle East “may cause returning officers to mistakenly blur the lines between military combat situations and civilian crime situations, resulting in inappropriate decisions and actions, particularly in the use of lethal force.”
Cosponsored by the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, this IACP report also noted that vets who have PTSD and related “depression, anger, withdrawal, and family issues” may have “a low tolerance for civilian complaints” and greater propensity for the “inappropriate use of force.” Some police chiefs interviewed reported that veterans under their command had come back “ill prepared for the civilian world” because their PTSD left them with “exaggerated survival instincts.”
Officer-Involved Shootings
Researchers at the University of Texas School of Public Health found that Dallas Police Department officers with military experience used their guns while on duty more than non-veterans. During a 10-year period, nearly one-third of more than 500 cops involved in a shooting incident were veterans. Those who had been deployed overseas were nearly three times as likely to have fired their weapon; those who had not been deployed were still twice as likely to be involved in a shooting. This study, published in the Journal of Public Health, concluded that some veterans employed by the Dallas police department lacked “critical thinking skills” when confronted with “high stress scenarios.”
The Marshall Project reported similar findings after it studied use-of-force complaints and fatal police shootings in several cities. In Boston and Miami, officers with military experience generated more civilian complaints of excessive force. Nearly one-third of the Albuquerque officers involved in a total of 35 fatal shootings between January 2010 and April 2014 were veterans. One of the officers sued after killing an unarmed motorist was an Iraq War veteran whose PTSD caused flashbacks, nightmares, and blackouts. Nevertheless, as the Marshall Project discovered, he was “assigned to patrol a high-crime area of town known as ‘the War Zone.’”
“To ensure public safety and guarantee a stable, reliable, and productive workforce,” Marshall Project researchers cited the need for clear and consistent police department policies to “evaluate employees’ mental and physical fitness. Yet local police department screening practices, around the country, remain far from standardized or effective. Some agencies employ the use of administrative interviews and psychological evaluations to assess how veteran officers will perform the essential functions of their position, while other agencies revert to their department medical officer, or lack any policy at all.”
No Local Constraints
Whatever unhelpful contribution to militarized policing has been made by hiring too many post-9/11 vets, new and old cops in Dallas, Boston, Miami, and other cities at least walk the streets without masks on. They display badges with their names and, in most places, wear body cameras as well. If they screw up in a high-stress situation, they are subject to internal affairs investigations or civilian police review board questioning, particularly if an officer-involved shooting has occurred.
When an Army veteran named Derek Chauvin put George Floyd in a fatal choke hold six years ago in Minneapolis, he was even prosecuted and sentenced to a long prison term. When another military veteran named Jonathan Rose—a former machine gunner in Iraq deployed in the Twin Cities last winter as an ICE agent—fired on Renee Good, did he face any criminal charges for killing a gay non-immigrant mother of three? Not yet.
So don’t hold your breath waiting for justice for Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero. For the last 18 months, federal immigration agents have operated with far less public oversight and accountability than any local police department. In the process, they have killed 23 people under circumstances that homicide detectives and local prosecutors have been blocked from properly investigating.
The Department of Homeland Security has just doubled down on its policy of not releasing the names of officers involved in these fatal encounters. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been directed to stop investigating claims by those, like David Brouillette, who say they used lethal force in response to being endangered.
Under current circumstances, no friends, family members, or employment counselors of young veterans should encourage them to answer the siren call of ICE—no matter how much they need a job. As one former ICE official told the Boston Globe, ”We should all be concerned… that they have lowered standards, that they have rushed hiring, and they have made offers to people before their vetting is complete.”
Even if applicants from military backgrounds lack the self-confessed “cognitive deficits” of Brouillette, wearing camo again—while stopping traffic, knocking down doors, brandishing automatic weapons, and engaging in car chases—is not a healthy career choice, for them or us.
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'Good Start': Meta Fine Now Nearly $1 Billion for Social Media Giant's Harm to Kids
"We cannot allow Meta to put its short-term profits above the emotional well-being of our kids," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Aug 07, 2026
A New Mexico court on Thursday ruled that Meta must pay an additional $567 million fine on top of the $375 million a jury fined the tech giant in March for harms caused to teens and children who use its Instagram and Facebook social media platforms.
First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in his 68-pager ruling that "significant numbers of people in New Mexico experience harm from Meta’s products due to risks of sexual exploitation, interference with education, and adverse mental health outcomes."
"The harm to the impacted New Mexicans is not doubtful, eventual, or contingent, but an immediate, temporally connected, and highly probable result of Meta’s actions," he continued.
"The youth mental health crisis has inflicted significant and widespread harm in New Mexico in terms of the number of youth suffering mental health harms, the profound suffering they and those in their families suffer, and the resulting interferences with the functioning of the schools, law enforcement, [and] healthcare systems in New Mexico," the judge added.
The case centered on allegations that Meta knowingly designed and operated Facebook and Instagram in ways that exposed children to harmful content, encouraged excessive use, and failed to adequately protect minors from exploitation. New Mexico officials argued that internal company knowledge and outside warnings showed Meta was aware of risks associated with its platforms but did not act sufficiently to address them.
Most of the new fine—$420 million—will go toward funding youth treatment services, while the rest is designated for awareness and prevention, screening services, and other costs.
Biedscheid's order also compels Meta to make changes to its platforms in New Mexico, including removing "like" counts and only showing them to minors with parental consent, and prohibiting overnight push notifications for users under age 18.
"Regardless of whether it is labeled as an 'addiction' or 'problematic use,' the evidence at trial proved that design elements, such as autoplay, infinite scroll, 'like counts,' and push notifications create a product that, particularly for adolescent users, is highly rewarding psychologically and neurochemically," he wrote. "As a result, for many, it is irresistibly compelling to start scrolling and very difficult to stop or abstain from its use."
"In addition," the judge added, "algorithmic content recommendations can create harmful feedback loops and 'rabbit hole' users. Within a similar vein, 'like counts'... can provide a potentially harmful focus for adolescent users."
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company would appeal the ruling, claiming: “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content. We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts."
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez hailed the ruling, saying that “Meta built products it knew would fuel addiction, deepen a youth mental health crisis, and expose children to sexual exploitation, then lied to parents and policymakers about the danger. Today, it pays for that choice.”
At Fairplay—a children's advocacy group—executive director Josh Golin hailed the "landmark ruling" as "the clearest indication yet that the tide is turning when it comes to protecting kids from social media."
"For the first time, Meta is being compelled by a court to change its dangerous and harmful design," he continued. "And with so many states lined up to sue Meta and other social media companies, we should expect to see a lot more injunctive relief to make online platforms used by young people safer."
“This ruling also clearly indicates why families need the Kids Online Safety Act," Golin added, referring to a controversial bill advanced this week by the Senate Commerce Committee. "The judge said it was up to Congress to address the addictive features on Instagram and other social media platforms. KOSA’s duty of care against compulsive use is the key to ensuring that Meta and other social media companies stop designing for addiction, as addictive design is the root of all social media harms.”
Justin Mazzola, deputy director of research at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement: "This verdict is an important step towards creating safer social media for children and young people. For years, Amnesty International has warned that major social media platforms have been designed to maximize engagement and profit, while failing to adequately protect children’s rights."
“Crucially, the court went beyond imposing a financial penalty," he continued. "By ordering changes to platform features, including removing 'like' counts for people under 18 and restricting overnight notifications, the ruling recognizes that the harms children experience online are often the result of deliberate design choices."
“Amnesty has been calling for exactly this kind of action," Mazzola added. "Child safety must be built into platforms from the start, not added as an afterthought once harms are identified. This decision sends a clear message that social media companies cannot continue to prioritize engagement at the expense of children’s well-being and rights.”
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said on Bluesky: "This is good news. For far too long, Big Tech corporations have put their bottom lines ahead of the health and safety of kids on their platforms."
"Congress must continue to push for accountability and real guardrails for companies like Meta as tech giants continue to grow," added Jayapal, who was critical of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act approved by the House of Representatives in June.
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also welcomed the ruling, posting on X that billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "greed is fueling a youth mental health crisis in America."
"Today, a judge ordered Meta to pay a $567 million fine for the damage it has done to our kids," Sanders added. "Good start. We cannot allow Meta to put its short-term profits above the emotional well-being of our kids."
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Two More Israeli Soldiers Kill Themselves Amid Crisis Driven by Horrors of Genocide
"As humans," explained one psychologist, "we can be both victims and perpetrators."
Jul 29, 2026
Two more Israeli soldiers killed themselves over the past two days, bringing renewed scrutiny to what experts say is a worsening mental health emergency inside the Israel Defense Forces during 33 months of genocidal war on Gaza and enduring stigma around seeking treatment.
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, two female IDF troops—a combat soldier and an intelligence officer—died by suicide this week. Israeli Military Police said they are investigating both deaths, which bring the number of active duty IDF troops who have killed themselves this year to at least 16. Haaretz said that at least nine former IDF soldiers have also committed suicide after completing their military service in 2026.
The latest deaths underscore what military officials, mental health professionals, and veterans have increasingly described as one of the most severe psychological crises the Israeli military has faced in decades.
Earlier this year, Haaretz reported that Israeli military suicides reached 21 in 2024 and 22 in 2025—the highest annual totals in roughly 15 years. Israel's oldest daily newspaper also found that the military had reduced the number of mental health officers available to soldiers despite unprecedented demand for psychological services.
The crisis has been exacerbated by repeated troop deployments since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack—itself the cause of tremendous trauma and some suicides by survivors—and Israel's subsequent assault on Gaza, which has been characterized by what prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague say are crimes against humanity and war crimes, and what a United Nations panel of experts said is a genocide.
More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza, some of them reportedly executed at close range.
IDF troops and Israeli and international medical workers have described the deliberate and indiscriminate shooting of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, some of whom were reportedly executed. Former Palestinian prisoners and Israeli troops and doctors have also reported torture and sexual abuse of detainees, and of civilians including children and even a toddler. Such carnage and abuse has taken a toll on the perpetrators as well as their victims.
A persistent stigma surrounding mental health treatment also discourages many soldiers from seeking the care they need. Some fear being viewed as weak or worry that treatment could adversely affect their military service or relationships, despite ongoing efforts to destigmatize the issue.
A senior IDF commander told the Israeli public broadcaster Kan last year that "most of the suicides resulted from the complex reality created by the war," adding, "War has consequences."
Earlier this year, Reuters reported that the IDF had recorded a nearly 40% increase in post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops since September 2023, with 60% of the 22,300 people being treated for war wounds experiencing PTSD. The news agency cited an Israeli parliamentary committee's finding that 279 soldiers had attempted to kill themselves in the period from January 2024 to July 2025, and that IDF combat soldiers comprised 78% of all suicides in Israel in 2024.
Some observers—especially Palestine defenders—have little sympathy for IDF soldiers who kill themselves, pointing to the widespread crimes being committed in Gaza and throughout illegally occupied Palestine, including apartheid, settler colonization, and ethnic cleansing.
Others, recognizing their humanity and the moral injury that experts say afflicts many participants in war, mourn these deaths while maintaining that compassion for soldiers must never eclipse accountability for crimes against Palestinians.
After Eliran Mizrahi, a 40-year-old Israeli father of four, killed himself in 2024, his sister told CNN, “He always said no one will understand what [he] saw."
Mizrahi's mother said that "he saw a lot of people die. Maybe he even killed someone. [But] we don’t teach our children to do things like this… so, when he did this, something like this, maybe it was a shock for him.”
US psychologist Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay coined the term “complex implication” to define how “history often implicates us in networks of harm, even as we carry our own traumas."
"As humans," she explained in a 2025 interview with Psychology Today, "we can be both victims and perpetrators.”
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Politics Should Never Decide Who Gets Care
The Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule putting political appointees in charge of healthcare-funding decisions threatens the patients we serve.
Jun 20, 2026
As a nurse educator and a psychiatric-mental health nurse, we have built our careers on evidence-based practice, ethics, and compassion when caring for patients. Politics never entered the picture. Our responsibility has always been to provide care guided by science, professional standards, and the individual needs of our patients, not political ideology or partisan priorities. That is why the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule, Docket OMB-2026-0034, which would hand healthcare funding decisions to political appointees, stops us cold.
At first glance, this proposal may sound administrative or technical. In reality, it would fundamentally alter how federally funded healthcare, nursing education, behavioral health programs, and scientific research are approved, monitored, and terminated. Under rule §200.340, any grant can be ended at any point if it no longer aligns with the priorities of the administration. That is not oversight. It is political control.
For nurses, the consequences would not be abstract. They would be immediate, personal, and dangerous for the patients we care for.
Psychiatric nursing already operates within a fragile system. Across the United States, communities face severe shortages of mental health professionals; long wait times for psychiatric care; rising suicide rates; surging substance use disorders; and escalating mental health crises among children, veterans, and older adults. Nurses are often the last line of support for patients who have nowhere else to go.
Healthcare funding decisions should be based on patient outcomes, workforce needs, public health evidence, and community impact, not whether a program aligns with the political priorities of whichever party holds power.
Every day, we talk with parents who are doing everything they can to find behavioral care for their children, but too often they feel frustrated and alone. Parents often share that they spend months calling providers, sitting on waitlists, and navigating insurance paperwork, all while trying to support their child through daily challenges at school and at home.
Hospitals are faced with the daunting task of finding inpatient services for patients in crisis. Sometimes the search for placement takes hours or even days, resulting in patients, many of them young people and the elderly, sitting in over-crowded emergency departments, waiting for care that may never come.
Many of the programs that train psychiatric nurses, support community mental health services, fund suicide prevention initiatives, and expand rural behavioral healthcare depend on federal grants and cooperative agreements. Under §200.205, the proposed OMB rule places a single political appointee in control over those funding decisions, with the power to override independent scientific and professional review.
This should alarm every American, regardless of political affiliation.
Healthcare funding decisions should be based on patient outcomes, workforce needs, public health evidence, and community impact, not whether a program aligns with the political priorities of whichever party holds power. Mental healthcare especially requires stability, continuity, and trust. When funding becomes politicized, patients inevitably suffer.
We are equally concerned about the chilling effect this rule would have on nursing schools and healthcare education programs. Federal support helps nursing programs prepare students to work in underserved communities, conduct behavioral health research, develop telepsychiatry services, and address disparities in care. Under §200.206 a political appointee could deny funding to any institution deemed “un-American,” a standard so vague it could be applied to programs addressing mental health disparities, harm reduction, or any work that falls outside current political favor.
We encourage nurses, educators, researchers, and the general public to join us and submit public comments on Docket OMB-2026-0034 before July 13, 2026, urging federal officials to reject these policies.
The proposed rule threatens the integrity of evidence-based practice itself. Nursing education is built on teaching students how to evaluate research critically, apply best practices, and advocate for patient-centered care. We cannot tell future nurses to “follow the science” while simultaneously allowing political officials to override scientific peer review and the expertise of those closest to patients.
We know what happens when systems become unstable. We witnessed it during the pandemic. Burnout rises. Staffing worsens. Experienced clinicians leave. Patients wait longer for care. Rural communities lose services first. One of us lived through the 2025 Southern California wildfires. Vulnerable populations suffer most. The mental health system was already stretched thin before the flames arrived.
This OMB proposal risks accelerating those exact outcomes.
Public trust in healthcare depends on the belief that medical and scientific decisions are guided by expertise rather than ideology. Once political influence is written into the structure of healthcare funding, that trust may never be fully restored. Mental health patients already fight stigma, long waits, and shrinking access to care. They should never have to wonder whether a political appointee is shaping the care available to them.
Nurses are educated to protect human dignity, promote health equity, and uphold evidence-based care. Those values do not change depending on which party controls Washington. They are foundational to the nursing profession and guide how nurses advocate for patients, families, and communities every single day.
The OMB proposal is framed as a restructuring of federal financial assistance, but for healthcare professionals on the ground, it represents something much larger: a deliberate shift away from independent expertise and toward political control over healthcare priorities. That does not strengthen nursing, mental healthcare, or public health. It dismantles all three.
We encourage nurses, educators, researchers, and the general public to join us and submit public comments on Docket OMB-2026-0034 before July 13, 2026, urging federal officials to reject these policies. If we allow political ideology to dictate which healthcare programs survive, which research is funded, and which communities receive support, we risk abandoning the very people the healthcare system exists to protect.
Nurses stand at the bedside of patients during their most vulnerable moments, regardless of politics, income, geography, or background. Federal healthcare policy should reflect a similar commitment. The future of mental healthcare, nursing education, and public trust in science depends on preserving independent, evidence-based decision-making free from political interference. Our patients deserve nothing less.
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You Can Mute Notifications But You Can't Escape the Algorithm
Social media companies have intentionally designed their products to be addictive to young users; the issue cannot be resolved until the entire architecture of the platforms is overhauled.
Jun 14, 2026
You can mute Instagram stories. You can turn off Snap Maps. You can silence every notification on your phone. But try turning off reels. Try removing your “explore page.” Try turning off your TikTok algorithm.
Social media platforms have spent years perfecting the art of giving users just enough control to feel empowered, but not enough to actually break away. The result is a false sense of autonomy. Psychology Today cites that users used to control their feeds by choosing who to follow and which posts to interact with, but most platforms have shifted to algorithms that prioritize content for users based upon its likelihood of engagement. Consumers now get countless settings to reorganize the surface level features of a structure that cannot be fundamentally changed.
These apps enable endless settings to facilitate an illusion of control, whether that be through settings privacy, hiding like counts, or blocking certain pages. But none of these features are meaningful. They all act as a decoy to prevent change from the much deeper issue.
The features you cannot turn off are the ones that keep you scrolling hour after hour. It is the product of years of behavioral engineering, precisely designed to exploit dopamine loops and addiction to keep account holders in a cycle that generates a feeling of continuous rewards. The ability to scroll infinitely on any platform through videos and suggested posts prevents the natural end that a finite feed would create. As time goes on, algorithms adapt to the users employing them. It understands what will make you excited, enraged, or captivated, all at the expense of your attention span and countless unreturnable hours of your life.
The question isn’t about how to not use social media—it's unavoidable. It’s about if you even have the ability to not use it.
In a landmark case in March of 2026, Meta and Youtube were just found guilty of intentionally addicting young users and damaging their mental health. The juries found them both negligent in the design of their platforms, knowing it was dangerous and failing to appropriately warn of the risks. The companies were required to pay $3 million in compensatory damages, and jurors recommended another $3 million in punitive damages.
This verdict is revolutionary because for the first time, the law has indicated that the design of the apps was the issue, rather than the content or the users. It changes the conversation from blaming consumers for being on social media too much to recognizing these apps are designed to make it impossible to walk away. This trial could set the precedent for the over 1,500 similar cases that have been filed against the companies.
The findings of this case are nothing new. For countless years, tobacco companies sold cigarettes knowing the devices engineered customer addiction, while vehemently denying the harm every step of the way. It's easy to reflect on that chapter of history with clearer vision, but it was difficult to spot in the moment. Now we are living through its modern day counterpart.
The difference in these cases is that purchasing cigarettes takes explicit effort, but social media follows you everywhere you go. It’s in your pocket, it’s with you at school, in the office; no place is out of reach and no moment is off-limits. There is no social media equivalent of a “no smoking zone” or too inappropriate of a place to check your phone. It is a socially enabled addiction with no guardrails to limit engagement.
The question isn’t about how to not use social media—it's unavoidable. It’s about if you even have the ability to not use it. When the entire algorithm is designed to keep you from clicking away, and keep the app gaining revenue, it’s not about your personal autonomy anymore, it's about the devices keeping you from being able to physically peel yourself away.
Politicians can see this problem too. California AB 2169 would require companies to provide a copy of their personal data, including behavioral profiles and the digital map of online interactions. It also mandates that platforms build a bridge to allow users to sync their friends and interactions to other apps. Michigan's Kids Over Clicks package SB 757-760 goes further to prohibit platforms from using minors' personal data to fuel recommendation algorithms without parental consent, banning manipulative patterns like streaks and reward systems to incentivize continued app usage, and strictly regulating AI companion chatbots that could encourage self-harm or serve as unlicensed therapists.
While these bills make leaps toward restoring user autonomy, none of them actually address social media addiction head-on. Knowing the features these apps use to trap you into endless scrolling is helpful but doesn’t stop the behavior at its core. The option to turn off these privacy settings and default restrictions is still present. The problem isn’t the content on the apps, but the design. We can’t stop at changing the features and restructuring the settings. The issue cannot be resolved until the entire architecture of the platforms is overhauled.
I’ll leave you with this: We already know how the story ends if we do nothing as we have lived it before. So what are we going to do today to write a different ending?
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Trump Isn't Mentally Ill; He's Evil
Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
May 14, 2026
Dear public figures, media folks, and journalists, please do not suggest that President Donald Trump is crazy. It is not helpful and, in fact, it is hurtful... not to him but the rest of us.
There are two main reasons for this request. First, calling Trump crazy is harmful to people who have a mental health condition or who have loved ones with a mental illness; second, it is inaccurate and leads to a serious misunderstanding of the man, his behavior, and it’s origins and consequences.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfair, hurtful, and false seterotypes of the mentally ill that are propagated and repeated over and over again in our society. For instance, media figures and journalists often describe perpetrators of violence as mentally ill. Generally speaking, this is not true. Study after study points out the the mentally ill, in fact, are not violent. Indeed, they are more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Most people with mental health diagnoses are law-abiding contributing members of society. Epidemiological research indicates that 97% of those with mental illness do not commit violent acts.
Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding. It is pretty common to hear or read that those whose behaviors are irrational, unpredictable, or erratic must have a mental health condition. This, also, is a harmful and erroneous stereotype. After all, irrational thinking is pretty common. We are all irrational some of the time and in some situations. and also rational and predictable in others. Irrational thoughts are completely normal. Researchers sometimes point out that some kinds of mental illness may include a deficit in common sense or deviations from social norms but not a deficit in logical thought or “reason.”
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump.
Another common misconception about those with mental illnesses is that they are dysfunctional and unable to live as honest and contributing members of their communities. This, too, is not true. The majority of those with a mental illness are simply ordinary folks. In any given year 20% or more of the population has a mental health diagnosis. Therefore, at any given time, there are millions of people with a mental health condition making positive contributions to their communities.
So, why do so many of us hold these false and damaging steretypes about those with a mental health condition? Perhaps the most common communicator of these misconceptions are the media of mass communication, both fictional (television, movies, internet sites, etc) and nonfiction (talk shows, news media, politicians, etc).
This brings me to Donald Trump. Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.
The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel's raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world.
And, of course, actions of this president also have caused harmful and deadly damages within the United States. Consider: the terrible harms, injuries, and deaths caused by his orders to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in the detention of over 50,000 adults and children in dangerous and deadly detention centers; he also has deported millions of individuals, some to dangerous countries or to the very life-threatening situations they fled. In addition, he has empowered his ICE agents to injure and even murder US citizens who were exercising their political and personal rights; Trump’s defunding of federal programs in the areas of healthcare and the environment has stripped men, women, and children of their access to food and medical care, causing pain, injury, and death to many people; and his administration’s reductions of environmental protections and general disregard of climate change threatens the health of all living beings,
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump. Nearly every day he posts messages that threaten his critics and opponents. He says he will use the power of the government to bring them down. He tells his supporters, “I am your retribution.” Time and time again, he threatens to destroy Iran, razing it to the ground and killing millions of Iranians. He announces planes to annex Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela. He hints that he is going to use force to change the political-economic system in Cuba. He says he will prosecute his political opponents for treason and has threatened to shoot those protesting in the streets. And, of course, he regularly declares that he will imprison immigrants and deport them to dangerous places. In just one year he has threatened to punish, invade, or take control of Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Nigeria, and Iran.
So, dear news anchors and pundits, please stop suggesting that President Donald Trump is mentally ill. Doing so defames and insults those of us who have a mental illness and misunderstands the problem that is Donald Trump. He is not “crazy.” He is prejudiced, cruel, violent, hateful, uninformed, dangerous, and immoral. Our president is not mentally ill. Our president is evil.
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The Lesson From the LA Teachers' Win: There Is Money to Pay Educators If We Demand It
For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to.
Apr 25, 2026
Before stepping into the classroom, I spent 12 years as an investigator with the California State Bar, examining cases of attorney misconduct. I chose to teach because I saw a meaningful way to serve my community, and I understood there would be sacrifice. Still, it took 10 years before my salary caught up to what I earned in my final year as an investigator.
In California, becoming an educator is neither easy nor inexpensive. In fact, it is one of the most challenging states to obtain a teaching license. Despite this, teachers remain among the most underpaid professionals relative to their level of education. According to the US Census Bureau, teacher earnings have not only lagged behind comparable fields, but have experienced a steady annual decline.
The debate is not whether schools have enough money, it is about what we choose to spend it on. Today, many educators cannot afford to live where they teach. Teaching, while never lucrative, used to offer a stable path to a middle class life. Educators could buy a home, live in the communities where they worked, and maintain the financial stability expected of other professions with similar levels of education. Sadly, even the most modest of those expectations are rapidly disappearing. I only own a home because I purchased it prior to switching my career.
Most educators did not choose this career for the money, but there is a clear difference between modest compensation and exploitation. Nearly 1 in 5 teachers in Los Angeles are housing insecure. And nearly 60% of educators across the country take on second jobs outside of teaching to make ends meet. It is unacceptable that the people responsible for educating our children are struggling to hold their head above water.
These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.
Teachers are also expected to subsidize their classrooms out of their own pockets. These stories are often framed as heartwarming and altruistic, but they reflect systemic failure and a lack of meaningful investment in public education. Few other professions require employees to pay out of pocket while already being underpaid.
The consequences of this underinvestment are becoming impossible to ignore. As the cost of living rises, fewer educators can afford to remain in the classroom. A teacher shortage has already hit Southern California, and the impact is profound. Nationally, teaching shortages have led to larger class sizes, burnout, and financial strain on the education system.
Education is expected to operate in scarcity while other sectors experience enormous growth. The education technology market alone is projected to grow by $170.8 billion by 2029. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, more than $1.6 billion has been spent on edtech. Framing this as a funding problem misses the point; it is a question of priorities. We are told we can’t make investments in educators, while billions continue to flow toward technology and outside contracts instead of the classrooms they are meant to serve.
And yet, during recent labor negotiations in Los Angeles, we were told a familiar refrain: There is no money.
This was the backdrop of three educational unions, representing more than 70,000 workers, on the brink of striking across Los Angeles. At the center of the dispute for United Teachers Los Angeles was a straightforward demand: a salary structure that reflects economic reality. As negotiations stretched over 14 months, frustration grew not only among educators but across school communities, culminating in escalating public pressure, organizing efforts at school sites, and an overwhelming strike authorization vote that made clear teachers were prepared to act if necessary.
Only when the possibility of a strike became real did the district return to the table with urgency. We ultimately won the majority of our demands, including overhauling the outdated pay system that kept incoming educators at artificially low salaries, raising the starting salary from $68,966 to $77,000 for teachers, and securing an average salary increase of 13.86% across the board. This is evidence that the “no money” claim is negotiable, not factual.
Just as significantly, for the first time in California, educators in Los Angeles have secured four weeks of paid parental leave. This is a historic breakthrough that now sets a precedent for teachers across the state of California, as well as the entire country. Additionally, we won a major expansion of student support, including more than 450 additional social workers, to address the growing mental health crisis among our youth.
These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.
When teachers are paid a living wage, they stay. When they can afford to live in the communities they serve, schools are more stable. And when students have access to trained mental health professionals, they are better able to learn. Investment is what makes public schools strong. Without it, everything else collapses.
For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to. The lesson from Los Angeles is simple: School funding is not fixed by scarcity, but by priorities. And when educators and school workers organize, those priorities can change—for the better.
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US Racism Waged a Multigenerational Assault on the Mental Well-Being of Black People
I lived in American segregation for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls.
Apr 16, 2026
I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” (as the final stanza of the national anthem puts it). Francis Scott Key wrote those words in 1814. However, they were not true then, or in 1942, or today in Donald Trump’s all too reactionary America. My Blackness consigned obstacles to me (as it would have in 1814 and 1942) that white people simply don’t have.
Let me explain.
Life Under Racism
Throughout the 1950s, living in a segregated project in Kinston, North Carolina, there were several odd characters who (I now understand) were mentally ill. One was Snap—or that was what we called him anyway—a man of medium height and brown complexion with a fuzzy beard. Rain or shine, he walked around in the same grey overcoat, spring, summer, and winter, too. Frequently, he sat in a chair under the shade of an oak tree with his eyes closed while smoking a corncob pipe. I never heard him utter a single word, not one, so I didn’t even know if he could speak.
As a kid, I thought he might have been named Snap because his brain had been fractured or broken somehow. When we neighborhood kids were involved in games, he would walk right through the middle of them (as if we didn’t exist). If we were playing football and one of us was running out for a pass, Snap would walk between the ball in the air and the receiver, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. So, we would just continue to play as if he didn’t exist.
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches.
I once asked my mother what was wrong with Snap and she responded with a degree of certainty: “He’s not right in the head because a bullet was lodged in his brain.” But she explained nothing more. So that left me wondering how he could walk around with a bullet in his head.
I never learned what actually happened to him (though I hate to imagine it today). He was taken care of by relatives who lived a few doors away from us in the project. We children weren’t afraid of him, though he was different from any other adult we knew. Instead, I remember feeling sadness whenever I saw him. He seemed so lonely, being unable to communicate with anyone.
Another character in our community was Preacher. He pushed a wooden cart all over town, making noises with his mouth like a motor car in motion. In the cart were pots, pans, and old clothes. I heard that he had been a Jackleg Preacher, which in my community meant that he had been untrained as a minister, but that he had been spoken to by God and told to preach and carry his message. As with Snap, I never heard Preacher say a word, but I recognized that he was crazy and so got out of his way.
The project where we lived was a community in which the “different” and “damaged” existed next to the normal. In better-off communities across the country, both Snap and Preacher would have been sent to mental institutions, but not in our segregated community. I often wonder if they were living examples of what can happen to Black people when racism joins with other forces, including poverty, personal trauma, and abuse, to break the mind. I later came to wonder whether the trauma of racism was in part responsible for their inability to function in a normal way.
The Psychological Effects of Racism
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches. In his classic book Black Skin, White Masks, Black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon developed accounts of the psychological effects of racism based, in part, on his own experiences in the French Caribbean. Some of the psychological conditions in the Black community can certainly be attributed to present-day racism, as well as to the multigenerational trauma inflicted on the descendants of American slavery. (Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University are now examining the links between racism and mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis.)
Mental illness certainly found its way into my family. My sister Sherrill held a special place among us because she was the youngest of us and a girl. She was a very good student and a pious Catholic attending the Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic school in her early years. Intelligent and attractive, with the distinctively large eyes of my mother’s family, during her teenage years, she became politically engaged, actively participating in sit-ins, as well as civil rights demonstrations led by our brother Simeon. We had many conversations in our family about civil rights in this country, as well as about how African nations had overcome colonialism by declaring independence and about what all of that meant for our own futures. During that period, Sherrill was active in every aspect of our family life, had good friends, and (although she was moody and could be unusually withdrawn at times) didn’t appear to have the sort of psychological issues that would destroy her promising future.
In 1960, the nuns (all of whom were white) at her Catholic school suggested Sherrill would be a good candidate for the Order’s high school, Saint Joseph’s Academy, in Pennsylvania. The Order of the Most Precious Blood had been founded in Switzerland in 1834 as an active apostolic congregation devoted to Eucharistic prayer and ministry. The Order believed in positive change in the world, was strongly against injustice, and emphasized the value of education, enhancing its appeal to my family.
Isolation in the White World
Nonetheless, in those years, Saint Joseph’s Academy, a boarding school, was a typically white institution with only three or four Black women students attending. Until then, in the still largely segregated South, Sherrill had never been to a school with white students, nor lived among white people. She had been educated in a segregated Catholic elementary school in Kinston. In the new environment, I suspect, my sister was afraid, since she had to deal daily with verbal abuse by white nuns and students who all too often communicated hostile messages toward Blacks. Nor did the school provide any counseling services to help Black students deal with such a grim ongoing reality.
The Doll Test
Religion was at the center of life at St. Joseph’s, but that didn’t prevent Sherrill from experiencing racist aggressions. Many years later, Sarah, a friend of Sherill’s who attended the academy two years before my sister, told me of the hurt she felt when she was excluded from a social gathering at the home of another student because only whites were invited. The racist views of so many of the students, as well as the nuns themselves, were deeply rooted in their psyches, as was then (and remains) true for so much of white America. Did the nuns feel that Black girls weren’t as smart as white girls? Nor as attractive? Nor as spiritual? Undoubtedly. As we know from the famous study of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in what is called “the Doll Test,” the effects of segregation were devastating. The study was cited in the Supreme Court’s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. The history of racism from the 1960s to the present moment suggests just what my sister must have experienced.
I believe she must have felt conflicted about leaving home and going to a school in a white community far away. In her frequent letters home, which I only recently reread, she expressed a great deal of loneliness. But she never said she wanted to leave the academy, holding onto her belief in the advantages such an education would provide. Many in the Black Catholic community in Kinston also believed the education provided to the young women at Saint Joseph’s was superior to that of the local segregated public school (and the Catholic school in Kinston did not go beyond eighth grade).
I knew at least five girls from Kinston who had preceded Sherrill to the Academy and for the most part believed the education was better. But today, looking back, I’ve reached a different conclusion. Education at the Academy for a Black young woman must be seen in the context of racism.
But Sherrill’s experiences as a Black girl in an almost completely white institution were not over with that school. She graduated from the academy in four years and matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then, the women’s college of the University of North Carolina, which had only recently been integrated by a few Black students). Thus, my sister’s education after eighth grade was in white institutions that inevitably were at best deeply insensitive and at worst openly hostile to the needs of Black students.
Black Community Support
My brothers and I had a different experience. We all remained in Kinston, attending the segregated Adkin high school. After that, we went to North Carolina College, as the historically Black College in Durham was then called. (Now, it’s North Carolina Central University.) My extended family, friends, and teachers at such Black institutions provided me with the emotional and intellectual grounding I needed to navigate the Jim Crow segregationist world.
But my sister’s experiences—being Black and very alone—must have been a terrible shock for her, since she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness while attending college. According to my mother, she started to hear voices, as well as imagine unreal events and presences. I now see clearly that racism, among other forces and factors, had a profound effect on her mental health and that it was a mistake for her to live in purely white environments at a critical time in her life, far from her family and the support of the Black community.
Worse yet, there was no help to be had then at St. Joseph’s or at the University of North Carolina. I wonder now whether she even realized what was happening to her. Her condition made it difficult at times for her to pay attention or make plans, although she still graduated with excellent grades. Did she believe that her psychological situation was due to her own weakness? Was she afraid? Ashamed? Did she see any connection between her increasing problems and the racism that affected all our lives? I suspect that she did as she aged and her condition worsened.
I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies.
There was another deep belief in our family, reflected in much of the Black community—that you must be stoic to overcome such grim external circumstances. The value of such stoicism and the adaptive capacity for resilience and resistance that goes with it has been deeply ingrained in the Black experience. Given slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, it was nothing less than an intuitive strategy for survival.
I don’t remember our mother’s response when Sherrill told her she was hearing voices, but I suspect she initially thought Sherrill was exaggerating, since she was doing well in college and that boded well for her future. At the time, our mother was still sensitive about having dropped out of high school at 16 to give birth to my brother Ricky, so she might have been reluctant to ask questions. I suspect she told Sherrill that it would all pass, that she would get through it—and Sherrill must have trusted those words because our mother had herself frequently exhibited an ability to rebound from severe pain and chronic discomfort.
And indeed, Sherrill persisted, graduated, and became a case worker for New York City’s Department of Welfare, working there for several years, maintaining social and family relationships, and even traveling to Europe with a friend. During that time, she must have also endured the pain of mental illness without complaint.
The break came in 1973. When Sherrill was 27 years old, our father, then only 51, died of a heart attack. Sherrill had been especially close to him and his death brought on full-blown psychotic symptoms. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia but refused to take medication for that dreaded disease. Over time, she became unable to deal with daily life, was evicted from her apartment and, homeless, began living in shelters or on the streets of New York City.
We searched for her, but with no luck. Then, one day, while walking in Central Park, I suddenly saw her sitting under a large spruce tree with a small suitcase, eating a sandwich. She was wearing a sundress and brown sandals and had inserted wildflowers in her hair. She appeared strangely calm and content as I approached her and carefully inquired how was she managing, asking where lived. At first, she looked away as if she didn’t even recognize me. Then, she slowly turned in a regal fashion and said, “I live here.”
I responded, “You can’t live in Central Park,” and I tried to warn her about the dangers of doing so. She insisted, “Yes I can—others do it.” I attempted to encourage her to take medication, but she simply smiled and looked away. The more I tried to get her to come with me, the more agitated and resistant she became. Finally, hoping against hope that she would remain where I had left her, I walked the few blocks to my mother’s apartment to tell her where Sherrill was and what had happened, but when my mother and I returned, she was gone.
After that, we kept trying to find her and each time we were successful, Mama would tell my sister that she could live with her if she agreed to take medication for schizophrenia. But Sherrill refused, always walking away from us angrily, insisting that she was fine and that we were the ignorant ones, that she was “high born and high class” and we were “common nigras.”
How sad that was. After all her lack of intimacy with and connection to white people and all the support she had received from Blacks, Sherrill came to believe that Prince Charles of England was coming to save her, that he would be her knight in shining armor.
Interventions
Over a six-year period, family members and friends tried to intervene a number of times and we finally did convince Sherrill to live with our brother, Simeon, in San Francisco. He thought he would be able to get through to her, but after six months he couldn’t deal with her mental state anymore.
Then, Sherrill went to live with the nuns at Saint Joseph’s Academy in Pennsylvania at the invitation of Sister Barbara, a Black woman who grew up in Kinston, who was like family and the only Black nun at the Academy. But after a few months living there, Sherrill grew so difficult that the nuns couldn’t cope and she became homeless again.
Finally, after a few years of various attempts to house her with relatives or in shelters, my mother and Sister Barbara went to court in Pennsylvania, convincing a Judge that Sherrill was a “danger to herself and others.” I joined them near a medical facility where she was being held and, while there, she finally and reluctantly accepted medication for her psychosis. After the medication took effect, we were all shocked by how cogent Sherrill became and how willing—finally!—to accept our help. She was cared for by our mother in her home for the next 40 years of her life.
During many of those years, I took her to regular medical appointments, including visits to a psychiatrist. Once I was present while the psychiatrist spoke with her about her medications. Sherrill was largely unresponsive, answering in single words. I had sympathy for the psychiatrist because Sherrill was often unresponsive even to me. Clearly, she didn’t wish to engage in discussions regarding her illness and, as she grew older, she became more remote from family and friends, as well as from her doctors. Episodes of psychotic delusions were often followed by periods of seeming calm when she could appear to be nearly normal, even if she was shy and began to retreat from family gatherings.
However, on that occasion, the psychiatrist’s question to Sherrill evoked deep emotion in her and my sister’s response reopened in me a profound love and affection for her. The psychiatrist asked her: “How do you feel—it must be difficult to live with this difficult illness?” Sherrill looked glassy-eyed, said nothing for a moment, and then started to sob and continued to do so for a full five minutes. Her weeping revealed the depth of her despair, the loss and tragedy of her life. I cried with her, for her pain, for the loss of all she could have become, and the closeness to me and to our family that schizophrenia prevented.
For her remaining years, Sherrill retreated from much of life, cared for by my mother, brother, and me. Her last three years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and another psychotic episode, were spent in a nursing home. She died on April 1, 2020, at 75, on the very day on which she had been born, in the nursing home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one could even visit her body. Hers was a sad and tragic life.
Aftermath
I can’t be sure why my sister became mentally ill, but I do know that she didn’t receive the help of mental professionals in the early moments when she needed it. The reason? It wasn’t available to her because she was Black, without the necessary resources, and came to adulthood in high school and college in communities that did not understand the needs of a young Black woman. In its most profound sense, racism blinded those who were supposed to be her caretakers.
Thirteen generations of Black people were born into slavery in America. Four generations lived through American Jim Crow. These were systems built on the supposed inferiority of Black people. The legacy is a long one. I lived in American segregation—a virulent, racist Apartheid system—for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls. I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies. And all of that represented and still represents a severe, multigenerational assault on the psychological well-being of Black people. We all have had to face these assaults; some overcame them, some, like my sister, succumbed, but at the deepest level none of us could ignore them, not for a moment.
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